Founded in 2005, JoomlArt (JA) is a leading Joomla!, Magento, and Drupal web template provider. The JA community has over 208,000 members and is steadily growing with over 5,000 new registrations each month. JA is a high traffic community site, receiving 39,649,352 individual pageviews monthly across the main site, forums, and download and demo sites. An average of 432,800 products are downloaded per month. The company has over 50 regular, part-time, and volunteer staff, and is located in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Prior to implementing Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology, JA was using SoftLayer dedicated servers. They still use these servers for their main site, and as a Joomla! demo site server for support and forum systems. However, says JoomlArt CEO Hung Dinh Viet, “Based on promising results with some of our services using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), we are moving more of our demo site servers to Amazon EC2 in the coming months.”

Hung says, “We are working on business models based on these services. Based on our success and experience with AWS, we have developed a JA Amazon S3 / CloudFront component for Joomla!, which enables easy integration of Amazon S3 and CloudFront support for Joomla! CMS and enables Joomla! users to easily adapt AWS for their sites. A built-in Amazon S3 and local file browser makes the workflow easy and simple.”

JA has seen other good outcomes as a result of using AWS. Hung says, “Server downtime is less than ever. Now all our images and files are from the cloud, so traffic load no longer takes the dedicated server down.” In addition, says Hung, “We are saving more than $1,000 per month on hosting. But the important part is that we are no longer losing money to server downtimes. Each hour of server downtime means the loss of thousands of dollars. Now the system admin can focus on adding capacity rather than fixing things.”

Use of AWS has enhanced JA’s business practices by enabling them to offer a “play before you pay” service; users can now clone the demo sites and test products before deciding to purchase them. Users can also generate a clone site and view the settings, so they no longer need to wait for a forum response regarding help or settings.

The JA team learned some important lessons throughout the development process:

Amazon EC2 is a very flexible system that fits their complex strategy to deploy large-scale service for hundreds of thousands of users.

They can use AWS for research purposes, to make their services better in a live environment.

Amazon EC2 can be used in a Linux environment for automated script tasks to launch instances quickly.

By combining multiple AWS services, they can manage services requiring large scale implementation.

Overall, says Hung, JA appreciates the proven stability and architecture of the AWS Cloud, multiple solutions for catering to various requirements and scalability, and the trust associated with the AWS brand.